Rediscovering Primo Levi
Notes on a graphic novel
Like almost everyone in Italy, I read If This Is A Man at school, when I was 12, I think. I liked it, but it remained one of those school books you read, put on the shelf and forget. It was only some years after, in my twenties, that I happened to re-open that book. My edition included the second book written by Levi, The Truce, so I re-read If This Is A Man, then I read The Truce, then I read all the other Levi’s books, then I read all the articles and the interviews I could find. In that period, a bookseller succeded to find me the complete Levi’s works, where the curator had retraced the story behind each Levi’s book. I found a writer far more complex than I thought I know, who had written science fiction, essays, poems, often using an unexpected irony. At the time I wasn’t even thinking about doing comics or graphic novels, but I realized there was a story there, precisely the story of how Levi became a writer. As you may know, Levi was actually a chemist, and he worked as a chemist for 30 years. Until the late 70's he wasn’t truly accepted as a writer by the Italian literary world, and he had even to struggle to publish his first book, If This Is A Man, which today we consider a classic.
What really struck me in Levi’s story was his utmost need to tell, to write. A need that was nearly physical, like hunger. At a certain point in my life I felt a similar need, and this is the reason why I made my first graphic novel (Diario di un addio — Journal Of A Farewell in English — Comma 22, 2010): there was a story I absolutely had to tell. It was my father’s story, who had been in a coma for five years. I needed to tell the things I saw, so my book was indeed the tale of a witness. Reading Levi, the witness par excellence, was of course extremely useful to me. To make a long story short, when the time came to think about a second book, I decided to work on Levi’s story. At that point I had a lot of reasons to do it. It was a good story, it was a way to pay a debt and it was an excellent excuse to draw Turin (hometown both for me and for Levi). There was of course also a moral reason: it was an attempt to take up Levi’s legacy, at a time when the eyewitnesses of the concentration camps are increasingly few. It may seem an ambitious task, but my work became a lot easier when I decided to start the book from Levi’s homecoming in Turin, in 1945, when he was only 26 year old. It was much easier to sympathize with a young man having worries common to everyone: finding a job, falling in love, and in his special case having an important book to write.
Anyone dealing with Levi’s life and story will soon find an obstacle, namely the extreme discretion surrounding his private life. Even if his books are almost all autobiographical, we know very little about his feelings and his family life. I read some biographies about him, but I wasn’t able to find there the Levi I had known through the books. Maybe that is because his life has been a very ordinary life (except for his experience in Auschwitz): he got married, had two children, worked in the same factory for 30 years, he even always lived in the same house where he was born. The only uncommon thing was his writing. It seems two me like there are two Levi: the writer, the public figure, and the man, with his private life. I was interested in the writer, and particularly in the image that we now keep of the writer. So I chose to tell Levi’s story through his books, using only episodes he wrote or spoke about. I tried to express this two-faced figure also with the images. For the cover I used as a reference a photo in which Levi “wears” an owl mask, being the owl the animal Levi often used as an alias. Even the title of the graphic novel, A Tranquil Star (taken from the title of one of Levi’s short story), refers to this duality: Levi was seen as an equilibrate and quiet man, when inside he was actually much more restless. The same mismatch occurs when we look at a star: static and quiet to our eyes, but hosting inside continuous fusions and reactions.
I think this drawing can explain well enough what I tried to do. The first face is copied from a photo, then I gradually modified Levi’s features in a more cartoonesque way.
In the same way, A Tranquil Star is not a biography but a portrait. It’s like when you go through a family album, trying to imagine how your parents and grandparents were like when you wasn’t born yet, what kind of life they had, what kind of person they were. In this respect, Levi’s work has always remind me of my grandfather’s war tales: he had been a prisoner in Germany during the war, and every Christmas he used to tell to us grandchildren his stories. And everytime he would say: “You don’t believe me, you can’t believe me, even to me these things seems unbelievable now”. But I did believed him, and I loved his tales, in the same way I believe in Levi’s words, as if he was an ideal grandfather to me.
Read the second part of this story: Drawing the concentration camp
